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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23979307">Matters of Importance</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/KLStarre/pseuds/KLStarre'>KLStarre</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Dimension 20 (Web Series), Dimension 20: A Crown of Candy</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Flashbacks, M/M, Pre-Canon, Unrequited Love</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-05-03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-05-03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-02 19:15:05</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,167</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23979307</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/KLStarre/pseuds/KLStarre</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>The Ravening War has been over for a year, and still Sir Theobald Gumbar spends his nights guarding his king’s door. There are other knights, and other guards, but he trusts none of them. He doesn’t think the King would notice, if he delegated the duty to someone else, but he would know, and he wouldn’t be able to sleep.</p><p>Of course, he doesn’t sleep, anyway. The war is in his bones.</p><p>(Or, Theo's in love with Amethar and everyone knows it but him, and Toby's in love with Theo, but it's not worth acknowledging)</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Theobald Gumbar/Amethar Rocks, Unrequited Theobald Gumbar/Amethar Rocks, Unrequited Toby/Theobald Gumbar</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>77</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Matters of Importance</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Been on the unrequited Theo/Amethar train since day one, but other aspects of this are partially inspired by this post: https://cloudmancy.tumblr.com/post/616949632719863808/i-know-theres-no-much-content-with-npcs-from-1st</p><p>ADDENDUM: This was written very early on in the season, and while it's still good, some of the characterization may be a little bit wonky.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The Ravening War has been over for a year, and still Sir Theobald Gumbar spends his nights guarding his king’s door. There are other knights, and other guards, but he trusts none of them. He doesn’t think the King would notice, if he delegated the duty to someone else, but <em>he </em>would know, and he wouldn’t be able to sleep.</p><p>            Of course, he doesn’t sleep, anyway. The war is in his bones.</p><p>            A noise sounds around the corner, the clanging of someone trying to walk quietly in full armor but still, in fact, wearing full armor, and Theo’s sword is drawn and at the ready by the time Sir Toby comes into view.</p><p>            “Is there danger, my lord?” is the first thing Toby asks.</p><p>            “Not that I know of,” Theo responds, but he doesn’t sheathe the sword, instead lowering it to his side. “Why are you here?”</p><p>            “One of the new recruits told me you were still here. Seemed worried about you. Did you send them away?” There are a lot of new recruits. There have to be, of course, to replace those lost, but that doesn’t mean they’re yet ready to do what needs to be done.</p><p>            “I told them they weren’t needed. They looked like they needed sleep.”</p><p>            “<em>You</em> look like you need sleep, my lord.”</p><p>            Theo looks at Toby. He is standing. He can swing a weapon. He’s barely aware of the weight of his shield and armor.  What more does he need to be awake? “I’m fine, Toby. Thank you for checking.”</p><p>            “You can’t protect the king if you’re about to pass out from exhaustion.” A pause. “My lord.”</p><p>            Theo blinks, and his body feels heavy. He’d slept – last night? No, the night before, which seems far too recent to need to again, but he goes to resheathe his sword and it takes him two tries to get it right. Maybe Toby is correct. “Are you offering to stand guard?”</p><p>            “No, my lord, I’m here to make sure you go to bed. These two are here to stand guard.” Toby gestures and two more guards, not yet knights, step out from around the corner, looking vaguely embarrassed. Osborne and Carlyle, Theo thinks, both solid fighters. Solid. Good enough. He opens his mouth to dismiss them, because good enough isn’t <em>good enough</em>, but his vision goes blurry for half a second and he sighs.</p><p>            “Alright. Osborne, Carlyle. See to it.” He nods to them and manages to step away from the door without falling over, stays standing beside Toby until they are in position, until he has assessed their armor and their weapons and the way they stand, and then begins to walk towards his quarters. He hasn’t spent more than a couple hours at a time there, recently, and is relieved that his feet still seem to know the way, because his head currently does not.</p><p>            It takes him a full minute and two turns to realize that Toby is still accompanying him. If Toby were an assassin, Theo and the king would both be dead. “You’re still here,” Theo says, instead of acknowledging that. Thinking about King Amethar dead – it is not something he does. Despite the hundreds of times he has come close.</p><p>            “Yes, my lord. I’m making sure you don’t pass out.”</p><p>            Theo doesn’t respond. Toby is right – as soon as he’d started walking, his armor had started to feel like it was weighing him down in a way it hadn’t since he was a boy, just beginning to train – but that doesn’t mean he has to like it. He’s never liked being taken care of.</p><p>            They reach the door to Theo’s rooms, and Theo stops in front of it, turning to Toby. “Thank you. You may leave.” It is a clear dismissal, but Toby doesn’t move.</p><p>            “My lord commander, may I speak freely?”</p><p>            Theo looks Toby up and down, and then pulls out his key and unlocks the door, pushing it open to reveal a sparse room, just a bed and a chair and a table and a set of drawers. The bed is made, not like it was made that morning, but like it hasn’t been slept in for weeks. “If you feel you must.” He steps inside and, after a moment, Toby follows him.</p><p>            Theo lights a lamp and then sits on the edge of the bed, gesturing for Toby to take the chair. “Well?”</p><p>            Toby sits, uncomfortable, and turns to face him. “We’re worried about you.”</p><p>            “Yes, I gathered that.” Now that he is in his room, seated on his bed, all the hours days weeks months of exhaustion come crashing down on him, and he sways. Toby has more to say, Theo assumes, and he reaches behind himself to begin unbuckling his breastplate in order to give him a chance to gather his thoughts. He finds himself unable, fingers too slowed by the need for sleep.</p><p>            “I’m worried about you,” Toby says, and Theo looks up, meets his eyes. There is – something unspoken there, something that only makes itself known on the rarest of occasions. They don’t acknowledge it. There would be no point.</p><p>            “I appreciate it, Toby.” He does, he thinks. He does not want to be worried about – it is his job to do the worrying – but he has grown enough accustomed to it to appreciate the driving sentiment.</p><p>            “There are…others who can protect the king.” It’s resignation in Toby’s voice, not jealousy.</p><p>            “Not like I can.”</p><p>            There is no argument to be made. The Rocks sisters had died, and Theo hadn’t been there. Amethar was alive, and Theo had, for as long as he had been able, always been there. And he has no intention of leaving. The light from the lamp flickers in response to a draught, and shadows scatter across Toby’s face before settling.</p><p>            “Can I help you with your armor, my lord?”</p><p>            Theo wants to say no. He can do it himself; Toby has already done more than enough.  But he also needs to sleep, or the king will die. Some rational part of his brain reminds him that these two things are not, necessarily, causational, but it is a small part, and as tired as the rest of him. “Yes,” he says. And then, “Please.”</p><p>            They stand up, and Theo turns, and Toby, with steady hands, unbuckles his breastplate and places it gently on the table. Theo will…polish it in the morning, he thinks to himself, slotting it into his mental schedule, and then is distracted by Toby’s hand, gentle, tracing a line on his neck.</p><p>“Is this a scar?” he asks.</p><p>Theo should move. He should tell Toby to go. It is late, and that scar, that particular scar, is one that is nearly always covered. It is not like the chunk missing from his ear, or the lattice across his chest, or the place behind his right knee that never fully healed and still throbs, sometimes, at night. “We all have scars,” he says.</p><p>“This should have killed you.”</p><p>“Yes.”</p><p>Toby begins work on Theo’s pauldrons, even though Theo is perfectly capable of removing them himself. “How?”</p><p>∞</p><p>Theo is surrounded, has been separated from his king, somehow, and he can see him across the battlefield, but he’s nearly thirty feet away, far enough that by the time Theo can get to him the battle will have pulled him further. And Theo can’t get to him, anyway, as desperately as he wants to; it is taking all of his focus to keep the Vegetanian warriors from killing him. He’s bleeding from his sword arm, the fingers slowly going numb, and he throws up his shield to parry as an axe swings down at him.</p><p>This can’t last. A quick glance out of the corner of his eye, King Amethar is swinging Payment Day, taking out two or three men at a time, and then Theo has to dodge and twirl, take off the head of some cabbage man, step close to another and stab him, too, take another quick glance toward where he had last seen the king –</p><p>Someone is running at Amethar, from behind, sword out and ready to swing, and the king is busy, slashing with wild abandon and yelling some indecipherable war cry and he is going to be <em>killed</em> and Theo is sprinting, turning away from his opponents. One of them gets him in the leg, as he runs, through the armor, and another nicks the back of his neck. Thirty feet on a battlefield might as well be an eternity, and an arrow bounces off his helmet and another three find purchase and he’s almost there, fuck, he’s almost there but he might be too slow, and he throws himself forward, giving up on his sword, throwing his body between the king and his assailant like it is what he was born to do – and, isn’t it?.</p><p>The sword slices through his armor like it’s nothing, fuck, there must be some magic to it, but he’s done his <em>job</em>, he’s given the king time to notice, to turn around, and it pierces his flesh and the only way to describe the pain is piercing, burning, a kind of desperation, and the sword keeps going and Theo falls to the ground, vision overwhelmed with red.</p><p>Theo awakens on a cot, in a tent. Alive. There had been no part of him that expected to be alive. He is lying on his back, staring straight up, breathing through the pain of everything, and he fumbles for his shield, feels panic briefly overwhelm pain when he can’t find it.</p><p>“Take a break, Theobald,” comes a voice from behind him, and Theo can’t turn to look, but he would know the king’s voice if he had been dead a hundred years. “You were dead, you deserve it.”</p><p>“I was…dead?” Theo asks, because that is the easiest part of all of this to address, easier, by far, than the fact that the king is here, was here while he was unconscious, waiting for him to wake up. He remembers himself, adds “my king,” to the end, even though he knows Amethar doesn’t care about formalities.</p><p>“For about thirty seconds.”</p><p>As far as Theo is aware, there is no magic that can bring a man back from death. “Are you sure, my lord?”</p><p>“Are you questioning me?”</p><p>Theo freezes, fingers into which he had been trying to wriggle feeling going suddenly still. “Never, my lord.”</p><p>He hears Amethar sigh behind him. “That was a joke, Theobald. Yes, you were dead. I killed the guy who did it – he was a fucking loser, just got in a lucky shot – and then I brought you back. My sister – Citrina, she had discovered…something. Some kind of potion. She only managed to make three before she died.”</p><p>            “And you – you used one on me?” Theo’s brain is a haze of pain, but there is something thrumming in his stomach, something he doesn’t recognize. Desperation, once again, maybe.</p><p>            “I owe you my life. Seems like the least I could do.”</p><p>            Amethar stands up then – he casts a shadow over Theo, and Theo’s knee shifts instinctually to kneel before his body remembers that he will be lucky if he can walk again. “See you on the battlefield,” he says, and then walks out of the tent before Theo can collect himself enough to thank him.</p><p>            This is not the first time Theo has saved the king’s life. In fact, he doubts he could tally the number, the pain he has voluntarily endured. It is…what he does. He does not expect thanks, or reward, for doing something that is buried deeper in him than even that fucking sword had been.</p><p>            But, nevertheless, there is a part of him…well, there is a part of him that he does not acknowledge. Amethar is the king, and Theo is his knight. Nothing more, nothing less.</p><p>∞</p><p>            “During the war. Saving the king,” is all Theo says. It is not a memory he talks about often. Like so much else, there is nothing to be said.</p><p>            Toby traces the scar with his forefinger one more time, and then Theo feels him move away.</p><p>            “You’re in love with him, aren’t you?” This is the counterpart to the unspoken moment of before. The reason it is unspoken.</p><p>            “Does it matter?” It doesn’t. Theo does not address it, or acknowledge it, or attempt to understand it, because it doesn’t matter and it never will. They are king and knight, and Theo does his duty better than any knight in the history of Calorum has ever done theirs, and if there is something more, there, something deeper, it’s not worth exploring.</p><p>            Toby finishes removing his armor. He stands in the doorway after, looking like he wants to say something else, but doesn’t. Theo locks the door behind him as he leaves.</p><p>            His bed is soft, he remembers with a start, when he lies down. He does not sleep.</p>
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